Drone Command (16 page)

THE MOOSEHEAD BAR

WILSON, WYOMING

FEBRUARY 1993

A
curtain of heavy snow fell in thick flakes. Troy slammed the brakes in front of the bar, nearly plowing into the back of a familiar custom pickup, a '66 Chevy 4x4 painted midnight black with orange flames raking the hood.

Troy leaped out of his own beater truck, leaving the motor running and windshield wipers slapping. He dashed through the front door just in time to see his dad smash a man in the mouth with his hammering fist. A gout of blood spewed out of the taller man's bearded mouth as he howled in pain. There were two other men on the floor already, one crawling toward a table, the other out cold. Troy prayed he wasn't dead. The air was hot and fetid and clouded with blue smoke. A honky-tonk steel guitar wailed on the jukebox.

“I'm calling the cops now, Troy,” the barkeep hollered. He slammed a rotary phone on the bar. Started to dial. “Get your old man outta here.”

A towering bear of a man shouted at the barkeep, six-foot-six if he was an inch and three hundred pounds. Big gut, bigger arms. Steel-toed boots and an ugly pockmarked face. “Fuck that. He started it, I'm gonna finish it.” He grabbed the rotary phone off the bar and yanked it hard, pulling the cord out, and tossed it across the room. The bell rang when it smashed against the wall.

“I shit bigger 'n you, you fat fuck,” Troy's dad slurred. He was nearly
a foot shorter and half the weight of the hulking brute. He started coughing fiercely.

“Fuck him up, JoJo!” A heavy woman in leathers horse-laughed, a cigarette dangling in her blistered mouth. She was perched precariously on a bar stool beneath a crumbling beehive of bleached purple hair matching the color of her lipstick and fingernails.

“That's the idea, honey.” A wiry man with bad teeth and biker tats grabbed a pool cue.

“Put that down,” Troy growled. He'd grown in the last two years. Six-foot-two, two hundred pounds of hard ax-swinging muscle.

“You gonna make me?” the wiry man asked.

“Are you shitting me? Put that damn thing down or I'll shove it up your ass.”

Troy's dad wobbled on unsteady feet. “I don't need your help, son. Get out!”

“Yeah, get out, son. Get out!” JoJo mocked, belly laughing. So did half the barflies crowding around the edges. JoJo reached into his oil-stained Levi's. Pulled out a quarter and tossed it at Troy. “There's a pay phone across the road. Call an ambulance. Your daddy's gonna need it.”

The quarter hit the cigarette butt–littered floor at Troy's feet.

“Idiot.” Troy picked up a chalk-stained cue ball from the pool table. Held it like a baseball. Pointed at the wiry biker. “Put that stick down now. We'll clear out.”

“I'm not going anywhere.” Troy's dad glowered at him.

“Only to the morgue, little man.” JoJo stepped closer.

“You tell him, JoJo!” the purple-haired woman bellowed, hoisting a beer.

Troy threw the cue ball hard. It thudded into the skinny man's chest right above the heart. He cried out. The pool cue in his gnarled hand clattered to the floor. He clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack and doubled over.

Troy was on him in an instant. Grabbed the man by his greasy hair and smashed his face with an iron-hard fist. The cartilage in the man's
nose cracked like a snapped pencil, gushing blood all over Troy's shirt before he collapsed in a heap, howling and clutching his broken face.

Troy turned to his dad. “Let's get out of here.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“What the hell's wrong with you?” Troy marched over and grabbed at his father but, he got shoved back hard.

“Touch me again and I'll put you down, you little son of a bitch.”

“You tell him!” the big woman shouted, laughing again.

“Get him out of here, Troy. I mean it!” The bartender held an old police billy club in his hands now, still hiding behind the bar as a shield.

“Dad, please.”

The man who had crawled under a table to escape his beating earlier suddenly leaped up behind Troy's dad and wrapped his arms around him. Before Troy's dad could break the armlock, JoJo lunged with a beer bottle from his blind side, swinging it like a hammer. It smashed against his dad's skull with a sickening thud. The rock-hard bottle didn't break.

His dad moaned and fell to his knees, reaching for his bleeding scalp.

JoJo turned and charged Troy, bottle held high in the air. He swung down just as he reached Troy, but Troy stepped into him, throwing a perfect punch into the lunging man's face, doubling the strength of the blow. JoJo's head snapped back like a Pez candy dispenser as his feet swept out from under him. He crashed to the floor, knocked out cold.

Troy turned just in time to see his dad collapse to the ground, his unblinking eyes staring straight back at him.

PORT OF TOKYO

TOKYO, JAPAN

13 MAY 2017

T
he freighter was nearly forty years old and looked every year of it on the outside with its peeling paint and rusted hull, but that was a convenient disguise. The old freighter's cargo hold had been lavishly refurbished for an entirely new purpose, fit for princes and champions.

Tanaka sat next to Kobayashi-
san
, the most powerful yakuza boss in Tokyo, in the premium seats with the best view, high up, like a caesar at the coliseum. Half of Japan's eighty thousand yakuza pledged allegiance to the Kobayashi-
gumi
, the most vicious and well-funded crime syndicate in the country.

Tanaka had known Kobayashi for years and owed much of his political career to the wise old yakuza. But Kobayashi had never invited Tanaka to one of these fabled events before, which, until tonight, Tanaka believed were only an urban legend.

Kobayashi had founded his
gumi
the old-fashioned way back in the '70s, through extortion, gambling, and prostitution. But his organization entered the ranks of the superwealthy by securing bank loans from Japan's most respectable institutions back in the bubbling heyday of the '80s, when banking regulations were lax and property values were soaring.

But when the great Japanese miracle bubble burst and the economy crashed, Kobayashi's unsecured bank loans were nowhere to be found, having been made by shell companies with no traceable records connected to the wily boss. When the dust finally settled on the real estate
crash, Kobayashi bought up prime Tokyo real estate in the early 2000s for pennies on the dollar, becoming one of Japan's largest legitimate commercial landlords. He was known in police circles by the code name the Realtor.

The yakuza organizations were not unlike the
keiretsu
conglomerates that dominated Japan's domestic economy, the powerful interlocking corporate relationships that forged the crony-capitalist system known as Japan, Inc. The yakuza organizations became natural allies with several of the largest Japanese
keiretsu
conglomerates and, in turn, with their political connections. The yakuza achieved in Japan what the American mafia could only dream of by several orders of magnitude. The Chicago mob connection to the Kennedys paled in comparison.

In recent years, tough laws cracking down on yakuza activities and their associations with political and corporate elites had significantly curtailed the smaller
gumi
s. But Kobayashi's organization flourished behind its gilded corporate doors and secure political connections.

But old habits died hard for the well-heeled gangster, and he kept his hand in the more traditional lines of the family business, especially gambling. In fact, gambling gave birth to the yakuza concept hundreds of years before; the name itself was derived from the numbers in a card game that indicated a losing hand. Despite his European-tailored suits and two-hundred-dollar haircuts, the now urbane Kobayashi was still a street gambler at heart—and a cold-blooded killer. Once a year he hosted the Golden Sword tournament on this ship, a sign of his nostalgia for all things Japanese and the old yakuza ways peopled with hard, violent men who fancied themselves the luckless sons of
ronin
—masterless samurai.

The polished bamboo floor was surrounded by three rows of plush leather bench seats, each row higher than the first, all with a clear view of the arena. The audience sat cross-legged in the traditional manner, and each was served the finest gourmet food and beverages available between bouts. The price of admission was one hundred ounces of gold. Kobayashi no longer trusted the fiat currencies of Japan or the West—but the one-hundred-twenty-thousand-dollar ticket price was pocket change for the assembled audience, most of whom were other yakuza bosses, including
several of Kobayashi's most trusted lieutenants. But the audience also included two Saudi princes, a Russian oil magnate, and several other respectable billionaires, along with a few select guests, including Tanaka.

Stable owners brought at least one fighter to the tournament and some brought several. Even though the real money would exchange hands in the betting, it was the victorious stable owner of tonight's tournament who would win a samurai sword crafted in pure twenty-four-carat gold—a useless instrument in combat, but of inestimable worth in bragging rights alone.

Tanaka watched the current bout eagerly. The two men squaring off were former national kendo champions, Japan's famous nonlethal sword-fighting martial art practiced all over the world. Traditional kendo combatants were covered from head to ankle in safety equipment—protective face masks, head gear, body armor, padded gloves—and wielded flexible bamboo-slat swords. International Kendo Federation (FIK) bouts were safe, and winners were determined by a point system based on landing harmless blows to the opponent.

But the Golden Sword was anything but a sanctioned FIK tournament.

The two past champions on the floor fought with only grilled face masks and wielded
bokuto
—samurai swords fashioned from the hardest known woods available. Battles were won when an opponent quit, was knocked unconscious, or was killed, the latter two easily accomplished with
bokuto
wielded by highly skilled swordsmen. Most preferred the long
katana
, but some fought with shorter
wakizashi
and even knife-sized
tanto
blades, sometimes one in each hand.

Without fear of injury or death, FIK bouts were almost dancelike in their careful choreography, each combatant seeking openings to swiftly score points with a tap of bamboo. But in the Golden Sword tournament, a single “point” scored with a wooden sword blade usually meant cracked teeth, broken bones, or a split skull and thus the end of the bout.

A large digital clock counted down the five-minute limit on bouts. Combatants who failed to score a single blow were given a second three-minute bout. If no points were scored then, both were eliminated from
the tournament and banned for life, which bore the greatest shame. Some unfortunates suffered harsher treatment later by their temperamental stable owners. But the rewards for winning fighters were mind-numbingly staggering. More than one millionaire would be made on the killing floor tonight, though perhaps at the cost of an eye, limb, or brain injury.

The two champions circled each other in short, sharp steps, both wielding long wooden
katana
. Suddenly, gut-wrenching screams exploded as both men lunged in a lightning-fast strike. The swords clacked like gunshots when they struck, swords flashing and striking again and again. The champion in black—a Korean—staggered under a blow to his left shoulder by the Japanese fighter in red, but not before he landed his own hard strike against the other man's helmet. Both men fell away, reeling in blinding pain, swords held up defensively. The clock was ticking down. Less than one minute to go.

The Japanese fighter ripped the helmet off his head and flung it aside. His hair was matted with blood where the blow landed.

The audience erupted with wild applause.

Kobayashi lit a fresh cigarette from his current one. A doe-eyed Russian girl refilled the yakuza's glass with bubbling Cristal.

“Is that one yours, Kobayashi-
san
?” Tanaka asked, nodding at the Japanese fighter.

The yakuza chuckled, his eyes still fixed on the killing floor. “Looking for an inside scoop?”

Tanaka laughed. “No. Your humble servant doesn't have enough gold to make a wager.”

“I can loan you any amount you need.”

“Thank you, sir, but no.”

Kobayashi slapped his knee, laughing loudly. “You always were the smart one, Tanaka! That's why I like you, even if you aren't a yakuza.”

“I'm not worthy of such an honor.”

Kobayashi howled again. “You're a politician, that's for sure!”

Both men knew that Tanaka was highborn and pure Japanese, but Kobayashi was the son of a Chinese mother and a poor working-class
Japanese father. Many yakuza were ethnic outcasts of non-Japanese heritage, despite being third- or even fourth-generation inhabitants of Japan. Unlike in America, being born in Japan didn't automatically make a person a Japanese citizen. Kobayashi never admitted to his shameful Chinese heritage, only to his legitimate Japanese blood. His untold wealth bought him the respect he needed from the poorer purebreds like Tanaka who needed either his muscle or cash—or both.

The digital clock flashed thirty seconds. A loud alarm bell began blaring like a klaxon, marking the countdown.

“Watch!” Kobayashi shouted, his aged eyes filled with childish delight.

The Japanese lunged at the Korean, a war cry screaming from his mouth, eyes crazed, sword raised high above his head for a killing blow.

The Korean raised his sword to block, but the Japanese checked his swing and pulled back at the last second. He cursed the Korean, called him a coward, his voice booming, amplified by pure adrenaline. The clock ticked off fifteen seconds.

The Korean circled cautiously. The crowd booed and jeered. The Japanese lowered his sword to his side and mocked the Korean's mother, his manhood, his paternity. The clock ticked five seconds to go.

The Korean shouted a bloodcurdling curse and grabbed his helmet with his left hand. In the second it took him to clear the mask from his face, the Japanese lunged again, sword held in both hands, thrusting straight forward. The sharp tip of the wooden blade plunged into the Korean's unprotected throat, cutting off his scream. He dropped his
katana
and instinctively grabbed the blade plunging into his neck. Too late.

The Japanese shouted his
kiai
, ramming the wooden tip in as deep as he could, legs pumping hard, forcing the Korean backward until the Korean tripped over the first row of seats, scattering the bettors, the Japanese fighter on top of him, throwing his full weight on his sword until the Korean's neck snapped in two with a crack.

The buzzer blared. Bout over.

The audience screamed with bloodlust, joyous, even the losers.

The Japanese lifted his bloody blade high, spreading his arms wide, face beaming with pride. A shower of gold and silver coins crashed on the floor at his feet.

Kobayashi shook his head in disgust. “No honor in that.”

Tanaka nodded his agreement. “He acts like a filthy American footballer after a goal.”

Kobayashi shook his head. “I fear for our young people. They have lost their way.” He took another drag on his cigarette.

“Then it's our responsibility to teach them the old ways before it's too late.”

“Too late? How?”

“I know you're a learned man and pay attention to the affairs of the world.”

Kobayashi grunted, accepting the compliment. “The Chinese again?”

“Yes.”

Kobayashi thought about that as he watched the Korean's corpse being ceremoniously carried away. Several towel boys slid onto the floor and mopped up the blood and sweat.

“Will we be at war soon?”

Tanaka nodded. “Yes. It's almost unavoidable.”

A voluptuous African woman with short-cropped, blazing red hair approached carrying a silver platter of freshly sliced sashimi. She described the extremely costly tray items in faultless Japanese.

“Almost unavoidable?” Kobayashi pointed at three different plates of sashimi. The girl set them down in front of him and flashed an offering smile at Tanaka. He waived her away and she left with a small bow.

“War can be avoided,
Oyabun
. But it will not be easy.”

Kobayashi lifted a piece of fatty
otoro
tuna with his chopsticks and dropped it into his mouth. The sweet belly meat practically melted on his tongue. He pointed to the plate, indicating Tanaka should take some. He did.

“What about Ito?” Kobayashi asked.

“He's an American lackey, a monkey on a leash. The fool will stumble into war and drag us all the way to hell. Unless you help me.”

The old yakuza nodded. Yakuza were famously patriotic and ultranationalistic, a common trait among organized-crime elements the world over. Even the Chinese Communists were known to have employed the lawless Triads in patriotic service to the world revolution.

“What must be done?”

Tanaka laid out the details of his plan as the next combatants entered the ring. Three men in green strode in from one side of the ring like a street gang, rough and unmannered. Their dark bare torsos were shredded with thick cords of sinewy muscle and slathered in bright yakuza ink, but heavy grilled kendo masks hid their faces. They took up positions on the far side of the circle, flashing their wooden swords back and forth as if flicking at flies, impatient for battle. Tanaka guessed the yakuza fighters were mixed-race Okinawans.

“Sounds risky. What's in it for you?”

“Nothing,
Oyabun
.”

“Not very smart. So what's in it for me?”

“Even less. Perhaps worse.” They both knew that Kobayashi was putting his entire organization at risk by throwing in with Tanaka's plan.

“So what would that make me?”

“A patriot.”

Kobayashi nodded his head, calculating. Finally, he snapped his head curtly.
Hai!

A lone fighter entered from the opposite side of the room, each step an act of ceremonial grace. He wore a traditional kendo uniform—a
keikogi
with three-quarter-length sleeves over his torso, and the pleated skirt known as a
hakama.
Both were dyed in traditional indigo blue. A white and red “sun circle” Japanese national flag was sewn on the back. His mask was tucked under one muscled arm. His face was stalwart and handsome like one of the samurai soap-opera stars seen constantly on Japanese television, but his thick black hair was styled in a crew cut, the bristles stiff and dense. He pulled on his mask with ritual precision and carefully adjusted the wooden
tanto
tucked in his belt.